


Sweet, Sweet Fantasy Baby

by Bigmurderenergy



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Video Game World, F/M, Free Guy inspired, Gaming Culture, Gen, a few game development terms, crunch culture, open world exploration, what if the NPC was a person
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:46:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27456697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bigmurderenergy/pseuds/Bigmurderenergy
Summary: Rey is coding and testing for a brand new video game when one of the NPCs, Kylo, designed to set up a series of events begins acting strangely. As she follows the bug to it's natural conclusion she starts to realise that Kylo has a mind of his own.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	Sweet, Sweet Fantasy Baby

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the trailer for Free Guy. Which is a weird thing to say out loud but sure. Just wondering what the natural progression for the programmer would be when finding such a strange bug. Of course, if you're Taika Waititi then you'll wanna delete it from your game but having a bit more knowledge on the gaming structures than the screenwriters did, I'm gonna have some fun with my own version of this eventuality. And yes, I want this to be slash. Eventually.

When it’s 2am, it’s best to stop drinking coffee, best to call it a day since you’re already into the next. You’re not going to fix anything when you’re sleep deprived.

Crunch doesn’t really allow for coherence when it comes to time though. Plus, Rey really needed to finish this level design or else she was blocking about twenty other people.

The company insists Rey doesn’t _have_ to work extra hours, especially not on a Saturday night. But if she doesn’t work then just remember all the other people who _chose_ to spend their time finishing their work. It’s not like she’s getting paid to do this. It’s not like anyone else is either. But the culture makes it feel like the quality of this game is on your own back. It’s not mismanagement or crushing deadlines which wilfully ignore the nature of coding when it comes to unit testing and bug fixing.

It’s 2am and Rey is thinking, there’s no need to keep doing this. Not really. But having been in the middle of crunch for 3 months at this point logical decisions when it comes to her personal health is routine. She ignores her aching head and boils the kettle for a tea instead of coffee. This means she’s cooling down. It’s not about the caffeine, it’s just something warm behind her aching fingers.

She’s been running this same level for about two weeks now and it just wasn’t quite right. There was some patchiness between instance loading, some of the environment details could be sharpened, she could talk to Finn about getting something a bit prettier for the decorations on the walls behind the bar.

The level itself being a bar where you could pick up quests from four different patrons. Two were fetch quests, one was a bounty and the last was a more complex storyline-based quest which involved a character that would turn up later in the game.

The character in question was acting more and more erratic, sometimes not responding to her avatar when she tried to initiate the event. Other times when she restarted the instance, he just wasn’t there at all.

Rey scoured the code trying to find whatever bug was causing him to evade her machinations. But at this point, at 2am, she was starting to lose her mind. The code was sound. She wrote it herself. Unit tests brought back no errors messages or missing packages. She sipped her tea impatiently trying to find the sod.

The game was interactive in a way that hadn’t been attempted in their previous games. A world where characters responded to actual vocal stimuli. Rey could stand in the bar in the virtual world and order a whiskey and the bartender would oblige. This implementation brought on a variety of coding nightmares. The game was getting intelligent at responding to vocal scripts, but it also meant having to account for a variety of vocal stimulus, like accents. Rey’s own voice was rarely picked up by the game inhabitants since most of the testing was done by men and they didn’t seem to pick up her higher register. The management refused to acknowledge this as a bug, so it just made testing all the harder for Rey.

Kylo was still nowhere to be seen within the environment. Rey sipped her tea. She’d literally just restarted the instance. What the heck is wrong with this guy?

“Kylo?” Rey tried on her microphone, “Where are you buddy?”

As if on cue, he ran from the other side of the room. Black hair, pale skin, strong jaw. She recalled he was modelled after his voice actor. He became an ascended extra after he did a good job with the material given and was even put into the game into later levels. Good for the actor. Bad for the coders who had to rewrite thousands of lines of code to include him.

Rey had mixed feelings about Kylo as an entity. Currently he was the bane of her existence. But she was so glad to see him she gasped, “Oh thank God.”

“Finally! Can you help me find my house?” Kylo asked.

Rey stared at the screen blankly. Was that… did he… go off script?

“E-excuse me?” She whispered into her headset.

“Yeah! Last time you took me there and I can’t seem to get back and I was just wondering if you could take me back to my house?”

“What the actual…” She immediately started scouring the script for anything that looked remotely like the response he just shouted at her, “Are you? Are you going off script?!”

“I don’t know what that means but I could really do with your help here, Rey. Please help me!”

OK, some of that was in the original script but he was calling her by name. Who wrote this in? Is this a joke? Someone had to be fucking with her. It’s 2am and someone took the time to fuck with her. That’s what’s happening. Crunch makes people do crazy things, like put in brand new scripted content for a game that was already over the deadline.

She grabbed her phone and started dialling while scrolling through pull requests to see if anyone other than her had touched the code in the past few hours.

Poe picked up immediately, “Yeah, whadaya want? I’m knee deep in bug territory here and I’d rather not start from the top, so it better be important!”

Rey is still glaring at her screen, Kylo is still yelling at her about finding his house. “Y-yeah, I got a bug too…”

“Ahuh, and you had to call me about it? You know we have Slack for this right?”

“Yeah… It’s not like that. Kylo… He’s talking to me.”

“He’s meant to do that Rey, that ain’t a bug.”

“No, Poe, he’s calling me by name. Did you do this? Did Ben record this? What is he doing? He’s grabbing my avatar by the arm and dragging me to the bar door, what the fuck is going on!?”

Poe sighed into the phone, “Rey, are you sure this isn’t just the sleep deprivation talking?”

“Poe I’m serious! Watch this!” She pulled her phone from her ear and started recording her screen which had Kylo yelling at her getting irater in a way that couldn’t have been coded in. His face desperate and pleading. She sent the video file to Poe on Slack.

“Oooook… Why not take him to his house then?” Poe suggested. “See where the bug takes you! Follow it to its natural conclusion you know? Then delete the damn thing.”

Rey wanted to cry, “He’s three months work…”

“This has to be a nightmare.” Poe groaned, the sound of angry typing clacking faintly in the background. “Just… Don’t worry about it too much. Help him out, document the bug and I’ll run over tomorrow, and we’ll work on it… After we both get some sleep. Deal?”

“Deal.” Rey almost sobbed. He was her senior in the end and yeah, everyone was suffering right now. “OK Kylo, let’s go to your house.”

Kylo’s face lit up on the screen. She smiled back.

The game was designed with third person modelling in mind, all the better for seeing the outfits you had bought in the game market. Rey’s avatar, named after her for testing, was dressed in a plain white t-shirt, grey chinos and brown cowboy boots. The world was set in a post western sci-fi mess; a veritable cornucopia of tropes. Think Red Dead Redemption set in a modern aesthetic on an alternative planet which had been setup with small towns scattered around an expansive continent.

The character quest tree Kylo unlocked was based on his character first and foremost. He had a tragic backstory, even the smallest side characters in this game tended to have such (unless they were being used for comic effect). Kylo’s house was a base that could be used by the player if you completed the quest tree. It starts with searching for clues over the murder of his father, the body being found in his home. Then a full revenge quest, then helping him come to terms with the events you help him through.

The voice actor, Ben, did amazing work with the script and as the directors worked with him through the storylines, they planted more story beats into the main campaign acknowledging that he could be a good base character for further exploration. There was even talk about making DLC content for his relationship with his mother.

Rey was mulling over this as she walked the several hundred metres to Kylo’s house on the general map for this zone. She also remembered that the iteration of this Kylo should be replaced with a new iteration between loading screens as she started the next story beat with him, watching as the autosave and load icon appeared in the bottom corner. But that didn’t happen.

Kylo was still talking animatedly about the fact he _knew_ where his house was, never missing a beat as he chattered inanely. But something felt wrong about the way he was explaining his feelings on the cause of his quest, briefly brushing past the death of his father, completely detached from the tortured cries that Ben had recorded nearly a year previous.

“I mean I’ve been going to the same bar for 2 weeks and you’ve been there every time and you always help me but sometimes you disappear for a while and when you come back you either ignore me for a while or stare at things and jump on tables.” Kylo chuckled, “You’re definitely not like the other guys in there.”

“Yeah that’s… I mean,” Rey sighed, “I was testing the table physics.”

“It’s a table Rey. What would you need to test?”

“I’m pretty sure I fell through it a couple times so it’s just one of those things. Habit at this point, y’know?”

“No, I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about. But you’re the only person who ever talks back. I mean what is with that bar tender? He won’t even serve me.”

“Well at least that’s working… I think?” Rey mused.

Kylo’s house came into view, the pixels had already been placed upon the new event that loaded as they walked over. Rey slapped her forehead as she realised why Kylo couldn’t find his home. It was because the iteration in the bar wouldn’t be able to load the house environment without the player leading. The map loads to the whim of the person playing. Therefore, an NPC, no matter how apparently cognitive, wouldn’t be able to influence the code into loading new screens.

This whole situation was giving her a massive headache. Maybe she was dreaming, this didn’t make any sense.

As they entered the house the scene began as expected, Kylo walking to his father’s body in the main foyer. Blood splattered artfully over the wooden floor. A silent tear fell from his pale cheek. Kylo looked up defiantly, “We have to make this right.”

“Oh, this isn’t right at all.” The first Kylo first iteration said. Rey turned to see him standing in the entrance, his face a mix of confusion and despair.

“You’re not wrong.” She said standing between them.


End file.
